3 Signs It’s Time to Manage Your Social Customer Care from the Contact Center

Expectations for social customer care are growing as more consumers are getting comfortable with online tools and technologies. It has been reported that number of social media customer service requests will increase by 37% this year.

Consumer adoption of Social Media for customer service continues to grow at great speed. In anticipation of the increasing number of social customer care requests, companies are dedicating more resources to keep up with this trend. The latest stats indicate that 80% of organizations plan to use social media for customer service.

However, implementing a new channel into your customer service workflow, monitoring activity and measuring results can present a great challenge. Integrating social customer care into the hands of agents in a contact center is an attractive method to scaling your operations to keep pace with customer demand. How is your company approaching this task?

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Below are the 3 most common signs indicating that you may not be doing social customer care effectively and it may be time to consider engaging an outsourced or managed services contact center partner to increase your efficiency and improve bottom line.

1. Marketing and PR People are Doing Social Customer Service.

Your customer service can suffer when marketing does customer service. While we are all thankful for the marketing team’s expertise and intentions, they are not always properly trained in the customer service process. If not done right, it has the collateral effect  of bringing down your customer satisfaction index.

When we see marketing teams handling social customer service, it usually turns out that the contact center team has one or more of the following issues:

1. Not enough people to dedicate to monitoring social for customer care inquiries.
2. Insufficient emphasis on the social channel for customer service purpose.
3. Lack of an effective process for engaging customers in a non-voice channel AND integrating  the interaction into the CRM

Regardless, you are at a loss of effective engagement or useful information.

Your marketing and PR campaigns are suffering too, because those experts are having to engage in customer service.

2. Response Times are Lagging Behind That of Your Competitors

Social customer care is quickly becoming another competitive ground for companies around the world. If you’re too slow in responding to a customer’s tweet, you might just lose that customer to your competition.

The latest Q4 report from Socialbakers revealed that the overall response times for different brands and industries who were dealing with customer service issues on Twitter and Facebook dropped by 12%.

Additionally, customer expectation at this point is very high. According to eDigital’s research, over a quarter (28%) of consumers expect a response within one hour when contacting a brand via social media, while 11% expect an immediate response.

Is your in-house contact center or contact center partner(s) able to match these expectations?

3. Technology is NOT Capable to Track Customer Service Performance

Measuring your customer care effort in social media is important for a couple reasons.

Firstly, customers expect to have a seamless brand experience across multiple service channels. If you don’t record and analyze interactions that happen on social media, you are inevitably going to lose some of that history which would enable your service agents to provide better support to customers.

Secondly, the lack of complete history of customer interactions fully integrated with your sales process will reduce your opportunities for up selling and cross selling and building a more efficient communication with clients.

Is your company ready to invest into sourcing the right tools, testing, and hiring qualified staff to implement and support them and then train the service agents to use the tools effectively? Consider these questions carefully.

 

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The bottom line is if you can’t meet customer expectations with your current resources, it may be a sign that you need to start looking for a contact center partner.

Customers are increasingly expecting to have a wide range of multiple communication channels available to them when contacting a brand. With social media rising in popularity, businesses who fail to adapt to this trend will find themselves at a disadvantage.

What is your outlook on social customer care? How is your company currently managing resources to provide quality customer service across different social media channels?

If you feel that any of the above three signs apply to you, then we should talk. Our experts will be happy to discuss your situation and guidance. From active content moderation to effective customer service process consulting, our guidance will allow you to get the most from each customer interaction.

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